


sing no hymns

by kitseybarbours



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Arson, Burning alive, Canon Timeline, Canon character deaths, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Minor Character Death, Sexual Content, Touch-Starved Agnes Montague, Unhealthy Relationships, Worship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:14:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24685921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitseybarbours/pseuds/kitseybarbours
Summary: To be a martyr, dead, is much better than to be a martyr, living. Agnes would know.
Relationships: Agnes Montague & Ronald Sinclair, Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson, Agnes Montague/Jude Perry, Jack Barnabas/Agnes Montague
Comments: 21
Kudos: 29





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title paraphrased from a quote in MAG116: “…and the part of me that sang no hymns bit down and choked upon the soft wood.” Chapter-specific content warnings will be listed in the endnotes; please do heed them!

* * *

Agnes has been worshipped since the day she was born.

Among her first memories are acolytes sinking to their knees when she toddled into a room. Her childhood is full of troubled stares, the looks of helpless distress they give her when she drops a toy, skins her knee, begins to wail. Very quickly she learns that her rage has little result; it will never bring her what she wants. They will not pick her up and give her comfort. They have seen what happens to those who try.

Still she rages, for she knows nothing else. How does a child whose skin burns like fire tell anyone that all she wants is comfort, the touch of a hand?

At eleven they send her away. By now she has become quieter, more independent; she has learnt to ignore their wide-eyed whispers and murmured prayers. She has learnt that to try and tell them of her pain, her loneliness is useless, for they only take it to prove that she is suffering on their behalf, to bring about the Desolation into whose service she was conceived. But they have not forgotten the early years, those acolytes who died at her hand.

It is proposed that she be sent to live with other children. It is no hardship to them: they can still worship her if she is safely out of reach.

* * *

At Hill Top Road only Mr Fielding knows who she truly is. He is young and kind and amiable, his sandy hair shaggy and long; his smile is open, and compelling somehow; you do not want to look away. She is wary of him, at first, because he alone of all the adults she has ever known does not speak to her in a reverent hush. He kneels down to her level to look her in the eye; he does not prostrate himself before her. He tells her that she will be safe here, in his home, which is her home now too. He tells her to ask him for anything she needs.

Before she leaves his study he lays his hand on her hair. He is the first person whose touch she can remember.

One day, after a few months—quiet months, peaceful months, in which Agnes learns to say _please_ and _thank you_ and _may I play too?—_ she works up the nerve to ask Mr Fielding why the others, the acolytes, had treated her the way they did. She had tried to ask them, before, but their answers were elliptical, obscure. They did not possess a dictionary in which she could find the word _messiah._

‘I think, Agnes,’ says Mr Fielding, squatting on his heels, ‘that when they look at you, all they can see is the destiny they have given you.’

 _Destiny._ The word feels sick and acid on her tongue. Hill Top Road does have a dictionary. _Destiny: a predetermined force of events._ She has to look up _predetermined,_ too, and when she learns that it means _inevitable, unchangeable, unavoidable,_ she feels her old rage searing through her.

She burns the dictionary to ashes. When Mr Fielding finds her, her face and hands streaked with soot, he does not say a word. She sobs and howls until her throat is raw, and then, gasping, exhausted, falls to the ground at his feet. He picks her up, carries her to bed, and strokes her auburn hair until she falls asleep. His hands are bandaged for days.

* * *

Now that she knows she has a destiny, Agnes begins to understand that fighting it is futile. Slowly, cautiously, as she grows from a child into a very young woman, she tries to accept it. She tries to convince herself, as her acolytes had once done, that she has chosen this; that sometime before her birth her soul chose this body, this vessel, for this reason and this alone. She tells herself again and again that this is not a burden but a gift. Sometimes she even believes it.

But the old rage still returns. As she grows older her moods become unpredictable, mercurial again. She stalks the streets of Oxford in the dead of night, too restless to sleep. When men approach her, as they always do, their leers as slick and shiny as spilt oil, she does not run from them. She bows her head and murmurs sweetly and shuffles her patent-leather toes. She lets them come close enough to touch her. She relishes their shouts and cries when their prowling fingers touch her skin.

Once they have touched her, she does not let them go. She clasps their faces with both her hands and watches as their flesh begins to bubble. Their strangled cries, their gurgling screams, make her smile. They sought her out, after all; they chose to touch her. They have a destiny, too, and like hers it ends in fire.

When she returns home from her ramblings Mr Fielding is waiting, awake. She glowers at him, daring him to speak. He never does.

* * *

Every Sunday Mr Fielding calls the house’s residents to order, all seated around the enormous dark table in the basement. The tabletop is etched with a vertiginous web of shimmering lines, from which it is difficult to look away.

She sits at this table every Sunday for years, staring into the depths of the web while Mr Fielding speaks to the children in his soothing, familiar voice. The children speak back, answer questions, voice their thoughts. Agnes is sure that she speaks, too, on more than one occasion, although later she will not remember what she or anyone has said. And she feels that the house speaks back to her, through Mr Fielding, through the table’s web.

The house tells her she is chosen. It praises her for accepting her fate. Agnes listens to it, mesmerised, and she feels strong. She is embracing her destiny, day by day.

* * *

Few of the other children at Hill Top Road speak to her. They are never openly unkind, but she knows she frightens them. She is sorry, she supposes, but she doesn’t see the use in making amends.

One of them is different. His name is Ronald Sinclair and he is much older than her, nearly a young man. He will not be with them for long. Perhaps this is why Agnes feels safe enough to reach out to him. The house has taken him under its spell; it will not let him hurt her.

She is cautious, at first, lingering in doorways of the rooms where he cleans or reads or plays rough-and-tumble with the younger boys. He will glance up from time to time and see her there, and he will smile. She sits next to him at the table on Sundays. Sometimes she creeps down the hall and listens outside his bedroom door as he strums the guitar Mr Fielding brought home for him one day. He’s not very good, but she likes to hear him play.

Once he sees Mr Fielding ruffle her hair as he passes by her, and the next time she meets him in the corridor, he does it too.

One night when she stands outside his door, listening to him make his way painfully through a Beatles tune, he stops playing. After a moment of silence he calls, ‘Agnes, I know you’re there.’

She pushes his door open. He pats the bed next to him; she sits.

‘You’re a strange one, aren’t you?’ he says without preamble. ‘Always quiet. Always watching. You never talk to anyone; you just watch. What are you looking for?’

No one has ever asked her this. Her throat is dry. The words surprise her: ‘A friend.’

He sticks out his hand, eyebrows raised. She shakes her head. ‘I can’t.’

‘All right,’ says Ronald easily. He looks down, strumming his guitar, his hair flopping into his eyes. ‘I’ll be your friend, strange little Agnes. You can talk to me.’

She does. Or she tries to. She begins, haltingly, to tell him about Diego and Arthur and Gene and the others, so many rapturous faces whose names she never knew. She tries to explain the power she carries, and when she sees the confusion on his face, she demonstrates: she takes his guitar pick between her fingers and melts it into sludge. Ronald’s face goes white.

‘I can’t stop it,’ she says, and there is something like pride in her voice. ‘I can’t turn it off. It’s always with me.’

‘Wicked,’ says Ronald.

‘Do you hear it too?’ she asks impulsively. ‘The house. The table.’

Ronald looks at her for a long, long time. He nods, slowly.

‘I hear it. It speaks to me. It’s loudest on Sundays, but I hear it other times, too. It puts thoughts in my mind. It…influences me to do things. Not bad things—good things, really, like brushing my teeth, sweeping the floor, playing with the littluns. Stuff I never did on my own, before I came here.’ He laughs. ‘I thought I was going mad, if I’m honest with you.’ He looks at her: ‘Or maybe that just means we’re both mad, eh?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she says fervently. ‘Not if you can hear it, too.’

Still she cannot touch him; she knows this is too much to ask. But for the first time in her life she does not feel alone.

* * *

And then Ronald turns eighteen, two weeks later. Mr Fielding announces that they have already found a job and a flat for him, and they will pick him up this afternoon. (It is not clear who, exactly, _they_ are, or where they will take him, or whether they will ever see Ronald again.)

In the morning Ronald tries to talk to her, to say goodbye. Agnes screams at him until she sobs, and then she flies up on her toes and presses a hot, hard kiss to his right cheek.

She slams her bedroom door and stays there sulking all day. She singes flies and spiders on her window until the sill is lined with burnt carcasses, offerings to some tiny god. 

In the early afternoon she hears a car pull up and the front door open. She looks out the window and sees Ronald with a suitcase, and Mr Fielding speaking to a nondescript man in a suit, holding a clipboard. Agnes feels the house’s disappointment, its loss; it mirrors her own.

As she watches, Ronald sets down his bag. Mr Fielding and the suited man are deep in conversation; they don’t see him go back inside. Agnes creeps out to the landing and peers down to watch him. She sees him walking to the basement stairs, brisk and purposeful—but his eyes are blank, as though in a trance. She tiptoes down from her bedroom and hovers on the basement landing.

Ronald is down there for a long time. Agnes closes her eyes and listens to the house. She is not surprised when she hears him scream: a long, anguished, horrified sound. She hears a _thump_ and then he is running, running, bolting up the stairs as though chased. His hand is clamped to his cheek, the cheek she had kissed; beneath his fingers the flesh glows red.

She steps aside and he races past her without seeing her.

He drops something as he goes; Agnes picks it up. It is an apple, with one bite taken out of it: deep, all the way down to the core. As she watches, a spider emerges from the opening, lowering itself to the ground on one gossamer thread.

Ronald has left the front door open in his hurry. ‘Ready to go, then, Ron?’ she hears Mr Fielding ask, clapping him on the shoulder. Ronald does not reply. Agnes hears the suitcase being hefted into the boot, the car doors opening and shutting. The engine turns over. Ronald is gone.

Agnes feels a tickle on the top of her foot. She looks down. The spider crawls across it, its abdomen grotesquely engorged.

* * *

She waits until that night to creep into the basement and learn what the house is hiding. Somehow it does not surprise her: she and the house are too well-acquainted by now. Bodies, the bodies of children she had known and watched grow up. There are so many of them, in such varying stages of decay, that they must have been here every Sunday, she must have noticed them before; but she has no recollection of them. Only now is the house letting her see them.

They are bloated. She prods one with her slippered toe and a spider’s egg-sac spills out.

She goes to the table. In its centre sits a box, its webbed lid hypnotic, dizzying, infinite. The lines of the pattern shimmer and glow with an eerie white light. It calls to her. She swears the house whispers to her then. _Take it. It’s yours._

She secrets the box beneath her bed. Once, Mr Fielding asks her if she’s seen it, and she lies. They never speak of it again.

* * *

When she is eighteen years old the worst happens. There are far fewer of them at Hill Top Road now. But none of them are as important to her as Mr Fielding, whom she has come to view as no less than a father. In fact, that is what the others believe: that she is his daughter, his own child. She has never had a parent before, and she likes it, immensely. She even likes when he gets upset with her, or has to ask her twice to do her chores, because it means that he is not afraid of her.

And then Mr Fielding falls ill.

He tells them all at dinner one night, the handful of children who remain. A hush falls over the table. Agnes drops a glass and it shatters on the ground, water pooling at her feet for the barest second before hissing away into steam. _‘No,’_ she says.

Emily, the littlest girl, looks from face to stricken face. ‘What’s cancer?’

‘It means he’s going to die. He’s going to die and leave us all alone.’ Agnes’ voice is bitter, her eyes blazing. She stands up, fists balling, feeling heat grow beneath her skin. ‘I trusted you.’

He calls after her but she is already gone. It’s December; the chill air does not register when it touches her face. Snow melts where she walks. In the house’s front garden is an ancient oak tree, tall, proud, sombre. The others are frightened of it: it never sprouts leaves anymore, it stays bare and forbidding throughout the year. One of the smaller boys broke off a branch once and ran sobbing into the house, telling Mr Fielding that the tree was bleeding, he had its blood on his hands.

Agnes loves this tree. Mr Fielding has told her the story of how his grandfather planted it, almost fifty years before, when this house became his. He tended it, and his son after him, and now it belongs to Raymond, to her own Mr Fielding. She has climbed this tree and read books among its branches, safe where no-one can see her. It is precious to her because it is precious to him.

But tonight she goes to the tree and wraps her arms around it and wills it to shrivel and smoulder and burn up beneath her. It does not take flame.

She wraps herself tighter around it, pressing as much of her deadly touch to its bark as she can, and it remains immovable, unmoved. She screams in frustration. She wants to hurt Mr Fielding, she wants to destroy this tree he loves, she wants him to hurt the way she is hurting. The tree stays whole, deaf to her sobs of rage.

When she returns inside, late that night—after a furious trek around the neighbourhood, setting fence rails and park benches and post-boxes alight—the other children are in bed. Mr Fielding sits on the doorstep, getting to his feet when he sees her coming down the road.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says softly. ‘I still have some time. Months, maybe a year.’

‘That’s not long enough.’

He reaches for her, suppliant, but she pushes him away, feeling a twisted satisfaction when the brush of her skin raises a red welt on his palm. ‘What will I do without you? No one else knows the truth. No one else understands.’ Agnes turns on him, furious, her skin lit with an unearthly glow. ‘No one _cares._ Ronald was the only one, and you sent him away. I’m alone now. You’re leaving me alone.’

‘The house,’ he says. ‘The house is here for you. It always has been.’

‘I don’t _want_ the house! I want— I want—’

She does not know how to finish her sentence. She cannot find the words.

* * *

He lingers on for nearly a year. He grows weaker by the month, and then the day. Knowing that he will soon no longer be able to care for them, he exhausts all his strength in finding homes and placements for the other children—or at least this is what he tells Agnes. She doesn’t go into the basement.

By the end it is only the two of them in the big, quiet house; only the two of them breathing.

When he calls her into his room that night, she knows what he will ask of her. For a long time they sit in silence, Agnes on the edge of his bed, watching the laboured rattle of his breath. He fumbles for her hand and takes it, hardly wincing at the heat.

‘It will hurt,’ she tells him.

‘Yes. And then it will be over.’

 _This, too, is destiny,_ she thinks, as she takes his left hand in both of hers. She grips it tightly. Already the skin is flushing red, blistering raw. He sucks in his breath through his teeth, his eyes closed. He is dying and still he does not look old. The heat begins to travel up his arm. He moans, softly, but he does not cry out, he does not beg her to stop.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Agnes,’ he says. ‘Agnes, Agnes.’

In answer she kisses his forehead and feels her lips sear the skin.

Before long his body is aflame, his bed a pyre. There is so little of him left now, lost within the flames, but still she hears his last words, a quiet ‘Thank you’ soon swallowed too by the fire.

When it is over, his right hand, the one she had not held, remains. It sits atop the ashes the way—as the acolytes had told her again and again—Agnes herself had done when she was born, whole and unscathed amid the charred remains of her mother. She takes it in her arms, cradles it in her lap like a babe. She sits among the ash until the sunrise, weeping without tears.

In the morning she takes the webbed box from under her bed and seals the hand inside. She is holy: she will create her own relics.

* * *

The house is hers now. The will—not to mention the house itself—makes it clear that she can stay here as long as she wants; she has enough money to take up a place at Oxford, if she chooses, or do nothing at all in perfect comfort. But without him in it, the house no longer feels like a home.

The garden quickly becomes overgrown. Stray cats and dogs congregate, scratching at the door and begging for food; but the bowls of water she sets out for them boil over and burn them from the inside out. Agnes buries them at night, beneath the shrivelled oak.

She takes to rambling the streets at night again, as she did in her early youth. Reports of men found lying dead in alleyways, their faces blackened and contorted in pain, lead to troubled whispers in the city of a killer. She _is_ one, she supposes, but she is more than that. She knows now what the word _messiah_ means. Her actions are righteous; they are divine.

But the child, Henry White: oh, that she does not intend. She hears him crying in the night, during a storm; he is lost. Hers is the first house he stumbles across. She kneels down to him and opens her arms. _You’re safe now. I’m here. Let me help._

She has been woken from sleep. She forgets. She forgets, until his skin grows hot beneath her hands and he begins to scream. She lets him go at once. It is already too late.

She buries him, too, beneath the oak. The rumours in the neighbourhood grow to a fever pitch. People hiss at her and spit at her when they pass her in the street. _Murderer. Witch._

After Henry White she makes up her mind.

She will not stay here: there is nothing left. Her destiny calls to her. She has begun to miss the adoration, the reverence; she needs something to feed on, lest her powers begin to consume her. She will return to the Lightless Flame and she will become what they made her.

* * *

One week later she sets the house ablaze. She stands among the flames and lets them warm her; she lets them lick her skin and burn her long hair to ashes, the hair Mr Fielding had once stroked until she fell asleep. His right hand rests safe in the web-topped box, clasped close now in her arms. The fire will not touch it. She will not let it.

The tree in the front yard still stands, unmoved by her powers now just as it was years before. Agnes breaks off one blackened branch, dripping bloody sap. It is the only other thing she takes with her when she leaves.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for chapter 1:
> 
> \- Implied sexual harassment of a teenager (and resulting murder by fire).  
>   
> \- Implied Web-typical memory loss/mental manipulation.  
>   
> \- Canon-typical horror elements: huge spiders, dead bodies, apples that contain things they shouldn’t.  
>   
> \- Cancer mention.  
>   
> \- More fire-murder, technically, although this time it is literally asked for.  
>   
> \- Graphic depictions of being burned alive.  
>   
> \- Canon-compliant implied deaths of animals and a child (Henry White).  
> 


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

Agnes is twenty-one when Gertrude Robinson finds her.

She has lived in Sheffield for three years now. Her red hair has grown back preternaturally quickly and is once again long and resplendent, more vibrant than before, as if in defiance—but there is no one, now, to stroke it until she sleeps. She lives alone; she has no visitors, no friends. She tries not to think about loneliness.

She wakes one night in searing pain, as though someone has torn her hair out by the roots. She screams. No one can hear her. Visions flood her mind, unbidden: the ashes of Hill Top Road. Her own discarded locks of hair, glowing like embers. Rain. A green clearing. Small animal corpses. An altar made of stone. And a woman.

She hears whispers in a language she does not understand. Prayers, or incantations. She is familiar with the other Entities, not only her own Desolation; her education had not been remiss to at least this one extent. She knows somehow that these entreaties are addressed to the Web; and yet why does she hear them, too?

The pain overtakes her then, and she falls into a black sleep.

* * *

 _A ritual,_ she understands when she wakes. The realisation comes in a voice not her own, a voice she welcomes: the voice of the house at Hill Top Road. It has grown fainter since she left, but the connection between them remains, however tenuous. She left enough of herself behind, in its ruins, for someone to collect and use to their own ends. Agnes almost admires them— _her,_ she thinks, recalling the vision—for her tenacity, if nothing else: picking Agnes’ hair out of the ashes, three years cold.

 _Why me?_ Agnes wonders. And what has been done?

* * *

The doorbell chimes two weeks later, and Agnes understands that she will have her answers at last.

When she opens the door and sees the woman from her vision, Agnes feels that she has been waiting not simply weeks but her whole life to meet her. She is older than Agnes by perhaps a decade; she wears her chestnut hair in a neat ponytail; behind red spectacles she frowns. They know each other at once. Agnes lets her in without a word.

They sit at the kitchen table, blackened nearly all over with scorch marks. They don’t say much. They don’t have to.

‘It was you,’ Agnes says softly. She is hoarse: she does not recall the last time she spoke aloud. ‘You performed the ritual.’

‘You knew?’ Gertrude’s voice is sharp.

‘I felt it. The house—what’s left of it—it told me.’ Agnes looks at her. ‘You used my hair.’

Gertrude turns her coffee mug around and around between her hands. It’s not good coffee, Agnes always burns it, but Gertrude doesn’t seem to notice. ‘We are—bound together now,’ says Gertrude stiffly. ‘Hill Top Road and you and I. The Web and the Desolation and the Eye.’

 _The Desolation._ The name of her god sends a tingle down Agnes’ spine. ‘The Eye?’ she asks. ‘That’s who you serve?’

‘I am the Archivist, yes. For now.’

‘And Mr Fielding…’

‘The Web—the house—laid claim to him, like all the men in his family, though he never allowed it to take him fully.’ Gertrude clears her throat. ‘You were like that, once, weren’t you? Wilful. Defiant. But your resistance has weakened with time. You let it take more and more of you.’

Anger flares in Agnes. ‘I have _chosen_ to accept my power. I was born to serve the Desolation; I have made it serve me in turn. I see no reason to deny my destiny.’

‘Your _destiny.’_ Gertrude laughs. ‘Bringing about the end of the world. If my ritual has succeeded, you’ll have to find something else to do.’

‘It hasn’t,’ says Agnes with confidence. But in the weeks since she awoke in the night, screaming—knowing that someone had taken the thread of her fate in their hands and twisted, twisted—her powers have receded slightly. She can no longer light the gas stove with a brush of her finger. It takes longer now, more effort, to send the heat thrumming through her. Water bubbles under her touch but does not boil.

She knows now this is Gertrude’s fault. ‘Hasn’t it?’ says Gertrude, eyebrows raised.

Agnes seethes. She stares at Gertrude, wishing now more than ever that she could immolate her with her gaze alone. And Gertrude looks back at her, her smile mocking, triumphant.

Agnes lunges across the table at her, not knowing what she intends to do, knowing only that she wants to hurt her. She lashes out with hands that should be glowing with fiery rage.

Gertrude stops her. She grabs her arms and does not cry out and drop them. Her fingers close around Agnes’ wrists.

‘Careful, Agnes,’ says Gertrude, low. ‘Your fire is dimming.’

They stare at each other.

One day, if the Eye permits her, Gertrude will grow old. One day, Gertrude will die. But now, today, Gertrude is fierce and daring and alive. Her hands leave Agnes’ wrists and come to rest upon her face, lightly, testing her skin’s heat.

Agnes trembles. No living being has been this close to her since Mr Fielding died. Gertrude strokes her cheekbone.

‘How can you—’ Agnes asks, a whisper. Her rage has been extinguished now, replaced with another fire: an inner fire, a different fire, a fire not her own.

‘The Eye,’ Gertrude murmurs. ‘It affords me some protection.’

Agnes takes in a breath. ‘How much?’

In answer Gertrude kisses her. Agnes moans in shock, and then kisses back fiercely, stunned by pleasure. It has been many years since she first accepted that she would never be kissed. How marvellous to be proven wrong.

‘Do that again,’ Agnes gasps, when Gertrude nips her lower lip between her teeth. She does, and Agnes makes a pleading sound, reaching for Gertrude. Gertrude stands to meet her—Agnes is taller by a head or more—and cups Agnes’ head in her hand, kissing her deeper still. Agnes’ hands find the buttons of Gertrude’s blouse and she scrabbles at them as they kiss, but Gertrude gives a low laugh and says, ‘Somewhere else, perhaps?’

‘My bedroom. Come on.’ She takes Gertrude by the hand and leads her upstairs.

She has never expected anyone else to see her bedroom for any reason, much less this one. Clothes are strewn over the chair, the floor, the half-open wardrobe door. A row of candles line the vanity table, some melted down to barely a wick; she amuses herself in lighting them with her fingers and watching the wax curl and bubble under her touch. A shrine to herself, perhaps. The carpet is littered here and there with ash.

Gertrude sees her pausing on the threshold, taking in the state of the room, and she nudges her arm. ‘You were hardly expecting visitors,’ she says, a touch of irony in her voice. ‘Come here.’

Agnes goes back into her arms. This time, when she reaches for Gertrude’s buttons, Gertrude helps her, and then reaches to pull Agnes’ black blouse over her head. Her long black skirt puddles on the floor, joined soon by Gertrude’s tartan pedal-pushers. Gertrude’s knickers are plain, practical, unfussy, and Agnes moves greedily to divest her of them, hearing Gertrude’s quiet chuckle at her eagerness.

‘This is all new to you, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we ought make it memorable.’

They fall back in a tangle of breath and limbs, Agnes moaning with abandon as Gertrude kisses her: her neck, her breasts, between her legs. There is a sense of conquest, a hard, fierce thing, in the way she touches her, in knowing that she and she alone _can_ touch her like this. Their gods have allowed it. Their gods have, perhaps, encouraged it. They are after all bound together.

‘Lie back,’ Gertrude murmurs, and Agnes obeys. Heat floods through her as Gertrude bends her head to Agnes’ cunt. She sets to pleasuring her with an expert tongue, as deft and certain as all her other movements. And Agnes begs, as she has never begged in her life—for, she thinks, she has never wanted anything as she does in this moment— ‘Fuck me. Please, please.’

Gertrude enters her with two ink-stained fingers, her mouth still working on her clit. She opens Agnes, presses deep inside of her to make Agnes gasp and writhe. Her hips arch off the bed and her hands fist in the sheets, so tightly she fears they will tear. This feels dangerous; this feels forbidden; never has Agnes imagined that she could have this, that anyone would risk their life to bring her pleasure. She has never imagined that anyone would try. But here is Gertrude, whole and alive and taking Agnes apart.

She comes in minutes, pleasure blazing through her, loosing wordless cries from her lips. Gertrude works her through it in long, intent stripes of her tongue, until Agnes cries out and begs her to stop, over-sensitive and spent. Gertrude raises her head and looks at her with triumph in her eyes. Agnes pulls her to her and kisses her deeply, tasting herself on her lips, her whole body shuddering with desire.

‘Touch me,’ Gertrude asks her. Agnes reaches between them without breaking the kiss, finding the chestnut curls between Gertrude’s legs and moving farther down, humming against Gertrude’s lips when she finds milky slickness there. She touches her the way she touches herself, two fingers circling her clit, and Gertrude presses into her, letting out a gasp as she rolls her hips. They kiss open-mouthed, lips and teeth; it is a tussle, a struggle they are both trying to win. At last Gertrude comes with a short, sharp cry, her body arching taut: _‘Yes.’_

They breathe against each other as their bodies settle. Where it touches hers, Gertrude’s skin is hot.

‘Thank you,’ Agnes whispers. ‘No one has ever—’

She doesn’t know where to begin. _Touched me like that. Fucked me like that. Looked at me without fear._

In the end she needs say no more. ‘I know,’ Gertrude murmurs.

* * *

‘What did you do?’ Agnes asks, later. Gertrude is stroking her hair, slow, meditative caresses: Agnes feels golden, like she is floating. ‘In Scotland.’

Gertrude huffs a laugh. ‘It was wretched. Trees and fire. I had a book to show me the way, a Leitner, of course, but nonetheless…Oh, you don’t know,’ she says softly, seeing Agnes’ confusion. ‘He did keep you sheltered, then.’

‘No,’ Agnes objects. ‘I’ve always known what I am. Who I am.’

‘Sweet thing,’ says Gertrude. ‘There is so much more. A whole world.’

‘Your world.’

‘Ours, now.’

Agnes is silent for a moment. ‘You are my rival.’ Gertrude hums, her fingers ghosting over Agnes’ nape. ‘You have set out to thwart me. You are an anchor, weighing me down.’

‘An anchor,’ Gertrude repeats. ‘Keeping us both alive.’

* * *

She does not stay. They dress slowly. The sun sinks behind the horizon, a red eye. At the door Gertrude places her hands on Agnes’ face, as if to absorb her warmth, to take it with her.

‘Will I see you again?’ Agnes asks, futilely.

Gertrude laughs. ‘Pray that you don’t.’

She kisses her once more, and then she is gone.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes:
> 
> \- Canon-typical horror: vague descriptions of the ritual site from MAG37 "Burnt Offering."


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

Fifteen years have passed. Agnes is still twenty-one. She can still feel Gertrude’s last kiss on her lips: there has been no other touch since that might have washed it away.

She has returned to her acolytes—or, they have returned to her. She likes Sheffield; she sees no reason to leave, when she knows they will go wherever she bids them. With Mr Fielding’s money she buys a crumbling apartment block and sends word to them, that she wishes them to come to her so they might live together, start anew. They come.

This time, they give her a guardian: Jude.

‘Officially,’ says Jude, sat across the table from Agnes, ‘I’m to keep you safe.’

Agnes has no doubt she’d be able to do that. Jude is half-Chinese, squat and muscular like a boxer; her stocky legs bounce with a manic energy that never seems to wear off. She is taut and alert, permanently scowling, always moments away from picking a fight. She reminds Agnes of a pit bull. Agnes has never been fond of dogs.

‘And unofficially?’ says Agnes, wary.

Jude laughs, a cruel sound. ‘To keep you from getting lonely. They saw how well _that_ turned out when you were a kid.’

‘Right.’ Agnes does not know what to say. This _interview,_ as Gene had called it, is a farce: they have appointed Jude, Agnes has no say in the matter. She might as well put an end to things now. She fidgets, smoothing down her long skirt—her taste in clothes has changed little since the seventies; she likes flowing things, loose and soft, that don’t constrict her skin. ‘So you’ll…live here. With me.’

‘Right you are.’ Jude surveys her with keen, hungry eyes.

Already Agnes is uncomfortable. The acolytes have their flats in the same building as hers, yes, but Agnes likes to have her own space. She wouldn’t know what to do if she had _asked_ someone to live with her, and this is certainly not the case.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Jude, misinterpreting her silence. She smiles broadly. ‘I won’t leave you alone.’

* * *

The acolytes talk about Jude. Agnes tries to keep herself removed from their gossip, believing that it is not her place to meddle in their day-to-day; but, living in one building as they do, it is impossible that whispers do not eventually reach her. From the others she hears that Jude—a stockbroker, and a good one, ruthless and canny—has murdered first one colleague, and then another, and then more. She grows more vicious each time and she is never caught.

When Agnes finally musters the courage to verify these rumours’ truth, Jude laughs her cruel laugh and says, ‘Yes, I killed them—and I enjoyed every second.’

‘I’ve killed, too,’ says Agnes. She had almost forgotten. ‘My last guardian. Raymond Fielding.’ She swallows. ‘He was ill. He asked me to…’

‘Dispatch him?’ Jude supplies. There is a vulgar interest in her tone. ‘How’d you do it?’

Agnes raises both palms. Jude nods her understanding. Haltingly Agnes describes the scene: how she had taken Mr Fielding’s hand in hers and held it until it shrivelled to bone. How the fire had eaten away at him, catching his clothes, his hair, as easily as paper. How the bed had become an inferno, a sacrificial pyre. Jude’s eyes grow darker and darker.

‘That’s beautiful,’ she says, her voice suffused with envy.

Agnes changes the subject.

One week later, Jude is reaching up for a glass in the cupboard, and Agnes sees a large, colourful patch of skin on her back, covered with clingfilm.

‘What’s that?’ she asks, coming closer.

‘Hm? Oh. New tattoo.’

Agnes peers at it. To her horror she sees a man ringed in flames, screaming as his body is consumed. His face is Raymond Fielding’s. Agnes feels sick.

Jude grins at her, almost a leer. ‘D’you like it?’

* * *

As much as she dislikes being forced to share her home, Agnes cannot help but admit that calling back her acolytes was the right decision. She needs them as much as they need her. She may have an anchor, but she has a destiny, too, and she intends to fulfil it.

Gene works in a factory where the furnaces burn hot. It is his idea to cause accidents for several of his superiors, so that eventually he takes over management. From there it is a simple thing to establish a workshop in the bowels of the building, and to lure unwitting victims in. He melts them into tallow. He pours it into foul candles and brings them home to her.

At first Agnes is horrified. The stench alone brings bile to the back of her throat, and she shakes her head, pushing them away. But Gene insists, ‘Try one’; and so she closes two fingers around the nearest wick.

The fire takes hold. The flame burns black. Thick smoke rises, and with it, the faintest scream. Agnes inhales sharply. She feels agony coursing through her, a suffering not her own, the most painful death imaginable—and she feels _alive._

‘Oh,’ she says softly. _‘Oh.’_

She closes her eyes and takes deep breath after deep breath. She cannot smell the stench anymore; she smells only burning, the pure scent of fire. She inhales their sacrifice.

 _Mine,_ she thinks. _They are mine._

‘Agnes,’ says Gene. ‘Is it enough?’

‘More than,’ Agnes murmurs. She looks up, wide-eyed, hazy. Jude, behind Gene with arms folded, laughs:

‘Look at her. You sure you didn’t put any of my blow in there?’

‘It’s better than that,’ says Agnes sharply. ‘You have no idea.’

‘Yes, Agnes.’ Jude—so confrontational with everyone else—subsides at once. Discomfort writhes in Agnes’ stomach; she pushes it away.

‘Thank you, Gene. This is— wonderful.’ Not the right thing to say, of course; this is at once sacred and profane, righteous and corrupt, there is no one word to describe it. ‘Will there be…more?’

‘As many as you need,’ he promises her. 

‘Thank you.’ Agnes casts her eyes back to the uncanny flame.

He leaves them then. Agnes remains immobile, drinking from the candle until it has burned low and her head is spinning. Jude watches her all the while. When Agnes finally tears herself away, Jude says, ‘I wish you looked at me that way.’

‘What?’ Agnes blinks, coming out of her trance.

‘I’ve never seen you like that. I’ve never seen you… _want_ anything before. You looked…hungry.’

A short, painful stab of memory: Gertrude’s face between Agnes’ legs, the heady insistence of her mouth. Agnes blows out the candle, breathing in its last sobbing puff of smoke. ‘It feels good,’ she says quietly. ‘It…feeds me.’

Jude leans forward. _‘I_ could feed you,’ she says. ‘If you’d let me. I’d do anything you wanted.’

The intensity with which Jude looks at her makes Agnes uneasy. They have been living together nearly two years now, and Agnes has always known that Jude wants her: it would be difficult not to notice. There have, certainly, been nights when Agnes has lain awake aching, yearning for touch, acutely aware that Jude’s bedroom was just down the hall. It was much easier not to want to be touched when she never had been, and never expected to be. But then came Gertrude, and things changed.

Jude is not Gertrude. Though she aligns herself with the Lightless Flame, with Agnes’ own Desolation rather than the rival power of the Eye, she does not understand Agnes the way Gertrude had done before they even met. She professes to love Agnes, as all the acolytes do; she would die for Agnes if she asked, as any of them would. For all that she is pugilistic, unpredictable, quick to swing her fists at any perceived slight—Agnes knows that above all she wants to serve her, in every way she can.

‘I can’t touch you,’ Agnes says. ‘You know that.’

Disappointment flares on Jude’s face. It’s as though she had expected Agnes to make an exception. (Again, Gertrude’s face behind her eyes.) ‘I know,’ says Jude, attempting nonchalance. ‘I just thought you…ought to know.’ Her fingers hover near Agnes’ hand, desperate to touch. Agnes pulls her hand away. ‘I want you. I’ll do anything for you. _Anything,_ Agnes.’

‘Tonight,’ Agnes says shortly, ‘I want you to leave me alone.’

If she were anyone else, the flare of anger in Jude’s eyes would have been followed by a swift punch, more than likely knocking her to the ground. But she is Agnes, and so the anger dies away as quickly as it had appeared. Jude bows her head and murmurs, ‘Sorry,’ the look on her face like a chastised dog.

Agnes would have preferred the punch.

* * *

A few nights later Agnes is lying in bed when she hears a blood-curdling scream. She leaps up and races to the living room, shouting Jude’s name: what has happened? Has someone broken in? She may still be wary of Jude’s intentions, but she does not wish for her to be hurt.

Her wishes are in vain—or, perhaps, quite the opposite.

In the living room is a pillar of fire. The air reeks of gasoline. Jude is burning, her head thrown back, her face splitting open in a cry of terrible glee. Agnes gasps. _‘Jude!’_

‘Agnes,’ Jude calls to her from within the flames. ‘Agnes, this is for you.’

* * *

Jude Perry dies that night. Something that calls itself by her name emerges from the fire.

‘Look,’ she whispers to Agnes, her skin flowing over her bones, moulding itself like wax. ‘Touch me now. Try it.’

Unwilling, Agnes lays one hand on her arm. The flesh—if it is flesh—does not burn away beneath her touch. Jude’s eyes shine with triumph, bright as fire.

* * *

Agnes does not want to say that she goes to her out of obligation. She does not want to start to think about that possibility: that she owes Jude this, for look what she has done for her sake. She tells herself that Jude would have reached this end in any case, infatuated with Agnes or not; the Desolation would have found her and lured her to its ends no matter what.

 _(Agnes,_ Jude had said. _Agnes, this is for you.)_

She still goes to her. Her knock at Jude’s door is soft, hesitant; there is a moment when she can still turn back, before Jude has looked up, has seen her; she almost goes. But then Jude catches sight of her, and lays down the magazine she is reading, and grins.

‘Hi,’ she says. ‘What can I do for you?’

Agnes crosses the room and kisses her. She does not want to talk. Jude exhales with pleased surprise, dropping her book and reaching up with strong arms to pull Agnes down onto the bed. Agnes resists a shudder at the waxy texture of her skin. ‘I wondered how long it would take,’ Jude murmurs against her mouth. ‘I did say I was here to make sure you didn’t get lonely.’

‘Be quiet,’ Agnes tells her, ‘and fuck me.’

She has never been so glad for someone to obey her. With a rapacious grin Jude bends to kiss her. She mouths hungrily down Agnes’ throat, burying her face in her hair. ‘You smell like a lit match,’ Jude murmurs, and Agnes feels like one, too.

Jude is well-prepared. She opens a night-stand drawer and lets her see what is inside; Agnes picks a toy. Jude fits it on and asks, ‘How?’

‘Beneath me.'

Jude lays back, her eyes dancing with eager lust. Agnes straddles her, exhaling as she sinks down onto the cock: it is made of glass, it warms instantly at her touch. _So this is what it feels like,_ she thinks, _to be fucked by fire._

Jude does as she is bid: she fucks Agnes until she is screaming. Agnes throws her head back, her long hair tumbling down over her breasts, one hand working furiously between her legs. She feels Jude’s eyes on her, the way she devours her with her gaze. She does not want to enjoy it, the melting heat where their bodies touch, but, oh, she does. Jude had promised once to feed her, and she does now. The fire between them feels like communion. Agnes does not want this, but it is what she has.

She comes with a cry of rage that leaves her throat raw. Jude whispers fierce devotion into her skin and Agnes tries not to hear it.

* * *

Later, when they are lying still, sweat drying, Jude brushes a long red lock from Agnes’ eyes. She tenses with memory.

‘Light of my life, fire of my loins.’ Jude’s laugh is like coal-smoke.

‘Funny.’

‘I love you, Agnes,’ Jude says, suddenly serious. ‘I wish you would believe me. It’s not like the others. I love you.’

Agnes rolls over, away from the heat of Jude’s gaze. ‘You can go now,’ she says.

* * *

It happens again. It happens more times than Agnes would like. Each time, Agnes knows, Jude feels that she has won; she is both supplicant and conqueror, victor and slave. She does everything Agnes asks of her, whether mundane or depraved. Agnes tests her, sometimes, just to prod the edges of this volatile bond. They always hold. She wishes she knew what would break them.

She feels sick when she looks at Jude and sees naked adoration in her eyes. She wants to cry out when Jude agrees with every word she says, thinking always to please her. She wants to quarrel. She wants to fight. She wants to take the pedestal Jude’s put her on and smash it into pieces.

 _I didn’t choose this,_ she thinks, when they are making love and Jude is moaning, writhing in fevered pleasure under the heat of Agnes’ touch. _I never asked to be anyone’s god._

She no longer wants to be worshipped.

And yet; and yet.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes for chapter 3:
> 
> \- Extremely unhealthy relationship.  
>   
> \- Descriptions of murdering and melting down ‘sacrifices,’ and their posthumous suffering (MAG139 “Chosen”).  
>   
> \- Suicide/transformation into an Avatar by self-immolation (MAG89 “Twice as Bright”).  
>   
> \- Sex as a tool of manipulation.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, all! I'm so sorry there was such a delay in getting this last chapter written. I hope it's worth the wait. Thank you so much for reading, and feel free to find me on Twitter @saintmontague.

* * *

Decades pass. Agnes picks an age—twenty-six—at random and decides to stay there. She is claustrophobic in the flat where she still lives with Jude; they share a bed now, against Agnes’ wishes, but it is too late to change the arrangement. Jude has grown stronger and less careful. Agnes does not know whether she could hurt her, if she tried. She does not want to find out; at least, not yet.

She begins to go out more. Her unnaturally young appearance goes mostly unremarked: she has lived as a recluse for years, most of the neighbours have never seen her face. She finds a small nearby café, the Canyon, and takes to going there most mornings. She orders a coffee—she has never done this before, she takes her cues from television— _black, with room for milk,_ the words rolling pleasurably off her tongue. She forgets to add the milk.

She finds a table by the window and sits there, all day sometimes, watching the ebb and flow of human life around her. Between her palms the coffee never grows cold.

The new millennium comes and goes. Jude kisses her at midnight and Agnes tolerates it, the waxy feeling of her lips still unnerving after all these years. Each year they celebrate Agnes’ birthday at Samhain, the festival of death and light. Time passes. Her destiny remains unfulfilled.

One day, she meets Jack.

* * *

He is new. She stopped going to the Canyon for a year or two, maybe longer, and when she comes back—one Tuesday, three p.m.—there he is behind the counter. She orders a black coffee with room for milk and he simply stares at her. She has to repeat her order. When he stammers back to life and fetches her coffee, slopping it over her hand in his haste (he apologises profusely; she does not feel a thing), she feels him keep staring as she goes to her table by the window and sits down. She looks out the window, as is her habit, but she can feel his eyes on her—periodic glances, darting, curious—all afternoon.

She is surprised to find she doesn’t mind the feeling.

Her coffee steams away before her, never growing colder. She doesn’t take a single sip.

* * *

Jude finds out. Of course she does.

‘I haven’t even spoken to him,’ Agnes insists.

This is technically untrue. She has ordered from him, murmuring the same five words each week. And she has thanked him, and asked, once, if he had been ill, when she had come in one Tuesday and he had not been there. And he told her, once, that he liked her dress—one she has worn to the café many times before; she has owned it for decades and it still fits like the day she bought it. _It’s vintage,_ she told him, with a small, secret smile.

‘I passed by the café and saw him chatting you up,’ Jude retorts, glowering. ‘Who is he? What’s his name? I want you to stop going there. I forbid you to speak to him, Agnes.’

Agnes gives a disbelieving laugh. She raises her palms and allows heat to collect there, the skin glowing an unearthly red. _‘You_ forbid _me?_ Jude, you forget yourself.’

A decade ago, even two years, this would have been enough to cow Jude. She would have bowed her head and deferred, an aura of shame hanging about her for the rest of the day. But as Agnes has grown distant, Jude has grown brave. She steps closer to her—the top of her head barely reaches Agnes’ chin—and gives her a defiant stare.

‘I gave you everything, Agnes,’ Jude reminds her, as though Agnes could forget. ‘We are bound together.’

This turn of phrase sends a short, hot knife of pain into Agnes’ stomach. She lowers her hands abruptly. ‘Get out. And stop following me.’

Jude obeys; but Agnes sees the glint of triumph on her face as she leaves, her smile like a steel blade.

* * *

Jude's obedience does not last long. She follows her to the Canyon next week.

She sits down at Agnes’ table, surprising her—she had not seen her through the window—and proceeds to talk loudly, possessively, using Agnes’ name over and over. She talks dangerously. She talks of things that they don’t discuss in front of the other acolytes, much less inside a café full of strangers. Agnes is furious; surely Jude can see this in her eyes. And behind the bar is Jack, glancing over now and then with a look of concern and—yes, she is sure—disappointment.

And then Jude starts talking about Gertrude. Agnes jerks back to attention. _Take her name out of your mouth,_ she wants to say. Instead, she snaps, ‘How do you know about her?’

Jude’s smile is cruel. ‘I have my sources,’ she says. ‘I found out all about her little ritual. But we’re cleverer than the Web.’ She leans forward across the table, and suddenly her gaze is almost soft. She reaches for Agnes’ hands but doesn’t take them. ‘We can get you out,’ she says. ‘Don’t you want it to release you?’

Agnes thinks of Gertrude Robinson, picking her hair out of the ashes of Hill Top Road. Of Gertrude stroking that same hair, slow, hypnotic, as Agnes lay naked on her chest and felt her heartbeat slowly calm. ‘No,’ she says softly—and then again, more certain, fixing Jude with her gaze: _‘No.’_ She feels her throat tightening. She does not look away.

Jude seems as though she will say something more; but finally she drops Agnes’ gaze. ‘Have it your way, then.’ She drains her coffee and stands to leave. A brown paper envelope thuds onto the table between them. Agnes looks up, puzzled.

‘A collection,’ Jude says, her voice flat. ‘From the acolytes. For your…For anything you might need.’ A pause. ‘It was my idea.’

As though in a trance Agnes reaches for the envelope—full, heavy—and slips it into her coat. She turns her head slowly and looks out the window again. Jude lingers for a moment, and then gives a frustrated sigh. Without another word she goes.

Agnes stares, and stares, and wills herself not to cry.

* * *

The next Tuesday, when, before handing over her coffee, Jack pauses and stammers and somehow manages to ask if she would like to go out with him sometime, Agnes says yes.

She would say she did so without thinking, but she did think: of Gertrude, of Jude. A small hopeful flame burns in the core of her when a stunned smile breaks out over Jack Barnabas’ face. _Different,_ she thinks. _He will be different._

* * *

He takes her to a park. He talks to her: about his school, about his uni course, about his parents and his childhood dog. About his job, and the music he likes, and his small handful of friends. She feels like an anthropologist studying a brand-new civilisation, so foreign are his words, his experiences to her; and they kindle a strange longing in her, a feeling unknown since childhood.

 _Normal._ All of this is so—normal. What would a life like that be like? Who would she be, if she lived it?

The sun is sinking, bloodying the evening sky. They sit on a bench. For the first time, silence falls between them; there is an autumn chill in the air.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she begins.

He seems surprised, and pleased. ‘Course you can.’

‘Do you have a destiny?’ The words tumble from her lips.

Jack’s eyebrows shoot up. He pauses for a moment, and then gives her a hesitant, rambling explanation, talking about God and fate. ‘No,’ he says finally. ‘No, I don’t think I do.’

Agnes looks at him. She feels, somewhere deep in her chest, something cracking open, and a curious finger of light poking in. ‘That must be nice,’ she says, and turns her gaze back to the sunset.

* * *

They go out again, and another time, and again after that. Even if she doesn’t eat when he takes her to restaurants, and doesn’t pay attention to the films he chooses at the cinema, Agnes is surprised by how much she enjoys his company; even more, that she looks forward to seeing him, and misses him when she can’t. (Jude is angry, of course—she found out soon enough—and yes, Agnes does relish this.)

It is the end of November now, and they are back in the park. Agnes likes to walk outdoors as it grows dark, and feel the cold wind whipping through her hair, cooling her ever-heated skin.

They are walking now. She has her hands in the pockets of her coat. She is wondering whether—since she is wearing gloves—she could take his hand. Would it hurt him?

Almost as soon as the word _hurt_ crosses her mind, a blinding pain shoots through her. She cries out, clutching her chest, and staggers, nearly falls. ‘Agnes!’ says Jack.

_The tree. The tree at Hill Top Road. The tree, and the apple, and the box. Raymond. Gertrude._

Something is terribly wrong. Her vision is blurring. ‘We need to go,’ Agnes chokes out, and she staggers blindly until she finds a phone booth, Jack trotting anxiously at her heels.

She calls the flats, she does not even know to whom she speaks, Gene or Arthur or one of the others. She does not know what she says; she hopes they understand. The pain is crushing her, making her weak at the knees; there are spots dancing in front of her eyes. ‘Please,’ she implores Jack, her voice sounding like it’s coming from very far away. ‘Take me home.’

He takes her by the arm. He does not leap away in pain. For this, at least, she can be grateful.

* * *

They are all waiting for her, huddled outside her flat. Diego holds a lantern and lets out an unbroken string of prayers, muttered in urgent Spanish beneath his breath. Two of the newer acolytes—if Agnes ever knew their names, she has forgotten them now—carry candles, and a jug of live spiders. They are prepared. _Did they know?_

Jude is in front, with her muscled arms folded across her chest, and though she makes sounds of concern when Agnes staggers into view, there is a look of righteousness on her hard, stubborn face. _I told you so,_ she seems to say, her gaze raking over Jack’s nervous form. _What did you expect would happen?_

The huddle parts. Their expectant faces, pale, afraid : their messiah has come home to them, they need her. Agnes can hardly see for the pain. She hates them, all of them, suddenly. They do not know her at all.

She turns to Jack. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says hoarsely. ‘Thank you. Good-bye.’ She knows already that this is an ending—of what, she cannot be certain. Hill Top Road calls to her, its anguished cries resonating through her every cell. She feels she will be rent apart.

‘But,’ Jack says, his lips parting in naïve confusion. She is sorry. She is so sorry. ‘But—Agnes, what is it? Have I done something wrong?’

‘Good-bye, Jack,’ she repeats, and the pain has crept now into her voice. She is not sure how much longer she can stand.

‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Wait.’

* * *

Once, she had thought Jack was different.

But when he asks her now if he can kiss her, in his eyes is not the curiosity, the rapacious need to _know,_ that had burned in Gertrude’s. What glimmers there instead is the hungry rapture that Jude wears every time she looks at Agnes. Like an angel, she cannot gaze at her head-on; like the sun. Agnes hates that look.

Jack wears it now, for the first time. It’s as though as mask has been pulled off, his true self revealed. Her heart breaks.

He waits. He tips his face up to hers. He says her name, like a prayer.

Agnes closes her eyes. She does not know from whom to beg forgiveness as she bends to press her burning kiss to his mouth.

She hears Jude’s growl of jealous rage. She hears shocked gasps from the others. She hears Jack, screaming in horror as the flesh of his face heats, melts, bubbles, burns. She hears the softest _hiss_ as a single tear—her own—goes up in steam.

She pulls back from him. He drops to the floor, already unrecognisable, sobbing from his ruined face. The others cluster round him, some in worry, some in glee: Agnes hears a harsh, manic laugh she thinks is Diego’s. She pushes through them. Jude grabs her arm— _‘Agnes,’_ a threat—but she jerks her hand back, swearing: the skin is singed, her palm a blistering red. Agnes goes up the stairs and into her room and locks the door behind her.

There will be no one else. Agnes knows this with certainty. In the end they have all been the same—all but the one forever kept from her by the war between their gods. Gertrude, Agnes thinks, was the only person who treated her like a human being; who understood that all Agnes has ever wanted is not to be worshipped, but to be loved.

But Gertrude is far from her now, trapped in her Institute, in the grip of a game whose end she strives ruthlessly, fruitlessly, to bring about. Gertrude is old. Gertrude has been allowed to live a life which, for all its faults, ought come to a natural end. Agnes has never envied anything so much.

She knows with sudden clarity that there is nothing left for her, here or anywhere. Her god has a new crop of acolytes falling over themselves to serve it—to serve _her,_ Agnes, yes, or so they think. But after she is gone, the Desolation will not lose them. Perhaps losing her will bind them still more firmly to it. Yes: that she could accept.

To be a martyr, dead, is much better than to be a martyr, living. Agnes would know.

* * *

That night, once the emergency crews have been and gone and they are alone again, she asks her acolytes for one last favour. Some of them gasp when they hear; some of them weep. Some of them fall to their knees, reaching for her, pleading. _We love you. We need you._

‘If you love me,’ she says, ‘you will do this for me.’

* * *

(Well: there is one more favour. ‘Don’t touch him,’ she commands them. However reluctantly, she knows they will obey.)

* * *

It is Jude whom she asks to perform the final act. Cruel, yes, to ask this of her, but she has been telling Agnes for years that she would do anything for her: Agnes is only calling in that promise. It is not so much to ask, after all, to sling a rope around her neck.

It is only them in the room, at the last. Agnes has bid her devotees her last farewell and left them clustered outside the door, awaiting Jude’s grim news. Agnes waits patiently as Jude ties the noose. She closes her eyes as Jude drapes it around her neck, the rope’s other end around a ceiling beam. She can feel the vehemence and the unwillingness in Jude’s every movement. She drinks it in like candle-smoke.

‘You’re selfish,’ Jude says bitterly. _‘This_ is selfish. What will we do without you?’ Agnes knows she means, _what will_ I _do?_

‘You’ll survive,’ says Agnes. ‘You’ll carry on.’ _You’ll find a new messiah, and I pray she is happier than me._

Jude makes a sound of disbelief, constricted in her throat. Agnes looks closely and sees that Jude is crying. She would never have thought this possible.

‘It’s all right,’ she tells her. ‘This is what I want. I’ve served our god for so long, Jude. I’m tired.’

‘The Desolation gave you _everything!_ And you’re throwing it all away!’

‘No,’ Agnes murmurs. ‘No, it couldn’t give me everything.’ She closes her eyes, and sees Gertrude’s face. She feels at peace. ‘Bring it to me,’ she says.

Jude does. Resting inside the box is Raymond Fielding’s right hand, as whole and unblemished as it had been on the day Agnes pulled it from his ashes, nearly half a century ago. With the ribbon Jude hands her, Agnes ties the appendage to her wrist, ignoring Jude’s scoff of disgust.

‘I’m ready, Jude. Leave me now.’

She doesn’t hear the last words Jude says to her. She can feel the burning heat of her gaze, willing Agnes to change her mind. It is too late for that now. Jude leaves the room, and slams the door behind her.

Agnes is alone. For a long time, this is how she was happiest. For a little while, she thought she could have it another way; she tried. How she tried. But she knows now that solitude is her destiny just as surely as fire.

She knows, too, that she is no longer bound to accept it.

She lifts a hand to the noose at her neck. It will hold; she is sure of it. Agnes thinks of Hill Top Road, of home. Ronald, Raymond: perhaps she will see them again; and Gertrude, too, when it is her time. She hopes she has earned some shade of afterlife.

 _Gertrude will know,_ she realises: they have been bound for decades now, of course she will feel this. Agnes thinks she will understand.

The hand on her wrist feels like a talisman, granting her safe passage. She swears she hears the voice of the house at Hill Top Road, one last time:

_Go, Agnes. Set yourself free._

What good is it to be a messiah if she cannot save herself?

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes:
> 
> \- Continued abusive/seriously unhealthy relationship between Agnes and Jude.  
>   
> \- Burning alive leading to severe facial disfigurement (as per canon content of MAG67).  
>   
> \- Suicide by hanging, heavily implied.


End file.
